


If I Ever Was A Child

by theweddingofthefoxes



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fluff, M/M, is this even how the Force works?, memory things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-07
Updated: 2016-11-07
Packaged: 2018-08-29 13:45:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8492083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theweddingofthefoxes/pseuds/theweddingofthefoxes
Summary: When Hux comes calling on Kylo Ren in the middle of the night, Ren thinks he's there to scold, yell, make snide remarks, the usual. What Hux has actually come for couldn't be more surprising.





	

**Author's Note:**

> "I'd jump to jolt my clumsy blood  
> While my wide green eyes  
> Cry like a windowpane  
> Can my cold heart change  
> Even out of spite?"
> 
> -'If I Ever Was A Child', Wilco

Kylo Ren was of the understanding that most people generally got six to eight hours of sleep each night cycle, but that had never been the case for him. He often felt stressed, or angry, or distraught, or self-loathing, but never sleepy or weary. Maybe he’d get three hours of sleep, maybe five, maybe one. It never seemed to matter. It always took forever to get there and he felt pretty much the same when he woke as he did before he started. Only after days of intense training did it ever feel necessary. 

He attributed it to the amount of meditation he did, but that wasn’t right, because he’d been that way from as early as he could remember. Getting him to go to bed had been a nightly war between himself and his parents, and by the time he was seven or so they’d simply given up, provided he was in his room and being quiet. Still, they’d tried. Once when he was six, he’d badgered his father who had just come home (exhausted from a week-long jaunt to some middle-of-nowhere planet, on what errand, the boy never knew) so late into the night that Han had made up a story about a monster that ate kids who wouldn’t go to sleep in order to get him off his back. “It has six eyes and six legs and six mouths and it’ll eat you too, kid, if you do not _go to bed_.”

The strategy backfired spectacularly. It scared him so much that he remained, awake and vigilant for any sign of the monster, his hand gripping his toy blaster so hard it left imprints, for two entire days. At last he began to sense the story might not be true and was persuaded to take a nap on a sofa. 

Well, that was then. No one but Snoke could tell him what he ought to do, nowadays, and Snoke couldn’t care less about his sleep schedule, so long as his training was progressing properly. And Ren rather enjoyed the quiet of the ship when he was awake while nearly everyone else was resting, both the physical quiet and the mental quiet, the way the Force was not chaotic with everyone else’s thoughts and plans and feelings, like chatter in a room that had finally faded away. He was almost happy, meditating late like this, comfortable, in tune with the Force. 

Until someone requested entry into his quarters.

Ren opened his eyes and frowned, coming to. Instinctively, hypocritically, he wondered who was possibly up to bother him at this hour. He cast the Force out and blinked a few times when he realized it was Hux, and permitted him inside, waiting, preparing himself for a fight. 

He expected anger. What could Hux want with him, if not to berate him for some infraction? Coming to deliver the sermon at…let’s see, around 0400 hours, that was a new one, but maybe he’d just found out about something that upset him. Hux wasn’t inclined to wait when there was scolding to be done. But Hux didn’t look angry, and suddenly Ren’s irritation subsided, replaced with…what, exactly? Discomfort? Unease?

Hux looked tired, almost ill, his eyes rimmed red and his skin somehow even paler than normal, his lips chapped and gnawed. He was dressed as formally as ever, but there was a subtle untidiness to his clothing, as though he had stripped for bed hours earlier but quickly re-dressed before seeking Ren out. He wasn’t wearing his gloves, and his hands nearly glowed white in the dim light. Normally when Ren brushed against Hux’s thoughts, it was all fire and machinery, everything moving too fast and too hard, a breakneck stream of consciousness, planning, plotting, seething, knowing, seeking, that nearly gave him panic attacks by proxy. Right now, though, the machinery was silent, giving Ren the impression of a ship crashed on an uninhabited planet. No signal.

What was Ren supposed to say? It seemed wrong to go on the offensive now, when Hux was standing there so pitifully. He chose his words carefully. 

“Am I correct in assuming something is very wrong, General?” Ren didn’t want to sound snide, but it came out that way all the same.

“I need your help.”

“Right now?” Ren asked, incredulous. “Is it an emergency? You should have raised an alarm—”

“Believe it or not, I know what to do in the event of an emergency,” Hux snarled, the expected anger flaring up at last. “This isn’t one. This is a more personal matter.” He deflated, his narrow shoulders slumping. “You know how to make people—forget. Don’t you?”

Ren narrowed his eyes. “I’m not sure where you’re going with this.”

“Answer me. Don’t you? Can’t you just point your finger at me and say, ‘You’re going to forget about something, and you’ll never think about it again’?”

“I…” Ren said, taken aback by the force of Hux’s request. There was something steely and desperate in his voice that Ren did not like at all. He sounded like he was drowning. “Yes. I could do that, if I knew what it was.” Of course, he could find out on his own if he cared to venture a little deeper into Hux’s thoughts, but he wasn’t sure he’d like what he found. That door would stay shut until Hux chose to open it. 

“Has something happened to you, General?”

He wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer to that either, but the question had to be asked.

“I can’t sleep,” Hux answered promptly, his nails digging into his palms. “I haven’t slept in three days.”

Ren thought back to the past few days. He hadn’t noticed anything glaring, out of the ordinary, but now that he thought about it, it did seem as though the officers had been more skittish than usual, and that Hux had been more frazzled. So this was why.

“It would be much easier—much more efficient—if the distraction was removed,” Hux went on. “I would be able to sleep. I would be myself again. I have tools for destroying memories but they’re…quite crude and general. They’re not intended for removing a single specific kind of memory. I would lose everything. It’s too imprecise. You have to help me. You’re the only one who can.”

“You have to tell me what it is first.” For some reason he had to hear Hux say it out loud. 

Hux’s eyes gleamed strangely as he swallowed and then said, “I want you to erase my memories of my mother.”

A few beats of silence passed between them and Hux’s fists tightened even more, so they trembled.

“All right,” Ren said, and Hux finally relaxed slightly, unbunching his fists, but he’d had them shut so tightly that they still curled in like claws, even when released. “Sit down.”

“Sit down where?”

“On my bed.”

The Hux Ren knew flickered back to life when he looked at Ren’s unmade bed—no doubt full of particles Hux would normally let nowhere near his delicate skin—in distaste.

“Does it really matter to you that much?” Ren snapped. “I’m doing you a favor. Sit or leave.”

Hux sat. 

“Close your eyes. Obviously, you wouldn’t be here if you weren’t prepared for me to get as deep as I plan to get in your head. This is your last chance to change your mind.”

Hux shook his head. “No. My mind’s made up. Delete everything.”

How apt that Hux would use such a technical term, as if Ren were repairing a faulty data pad. “All right. You won’t remember having this conversation, so there’s nothing to be embarrassed about later. Why do you want me to do this?”

Hux went pink but answered the question. It didn’t hurt that Ren was gently prodding him mentally, giving him a dose of confidence to speak on this topic. “I suppose it’s as if I’m having the opposite of a nightmare. The memories have been particularly persistent around the time of her birthday. I…” He trailed off, thinking, then resumed. His voice sounded less brittle and desperate as he went on. “I am distracted. Distracted by the unrealistic. Remembering her is not motivational. It does not encourage me to complete an objective, the way thoughts of my father do. When I think of him, I double down. I am filled with determination to succeed, to prove him wrong in every way. When I think of my mother, however…”

He trailed off again.

When Hux first sat down, Ren had been standing in front of him, looking down at him. As he spoke, though, Ren settled down next to him on the bed so they were sitting side-by-side, their legs over the side of the mattress and feet on the floor. Hux had started out primly balanced on the very edge of the bed, but had begun to settle back as he spoke, as Ren gently made his way into his mind. As he relaxed, letting Ren get in, he started leaning back so far he was in danger of falling backwards, and Ren put an arm around him to keep him upright. 

“She was always so kind to me. She didn’t have to be, which is the part that I think about most.” Hux sighed. “She had every reason to resent me. I was, after all, the spitting image of my father, who treated her miserably. And I had no choice but to follow in his footsteps. To become him, but even more so, even better. She had every right to hate me, and she never did.”

“And yet you want to forget her.”

“I’ll never see her again,” Hux said, a simple statement of fact, fully within the trance Ren had led him into now. “I don’t even know if she’s still alive. I haven’t had any contact with her at all since I was in my early teens. It would be much better for me to not wonder.”

“Keep talking about her,” Ren commanded him as he followed along inside Hux’s head. “It’s easier for me to access you this way.”

“She was so small. So slight. My father used to say I had her build, and he didn’t mean it as a compliment.” Hux’s mouth twisted into a bitter smile. Sure enough, Ren could see her, faint and dim but present, called up from Hux’s memories, her narrow waist, her slender neck. “But she loved to carry me, in her arms or on her back. I was shy child, if you can believe that. I would hide my face in her shoulder the few times my father saw me when I was very young. I was foolish enough to think that she was the entire world and he was nothing, that far back.”

Ren pressed against the vein of memories, could hear the low gentle murmur of her voice as effortlessly as if it were his own recollection. He imagined himself as a surgeon, poised over Hux with a scalpel, ready to excise. The thoughts were coming so strong now, now that Hux had surrendered his mind entirely, threatening to drown Ren in sensory overload. The feeling of being held, of being spoiled and loved and wanted, the feeling of having a safe place to hide from a threat washed over him. But under that was revulsion, Hux’s hatred for his own weakness—for desiring those things. For wanting to be happy and protected and adored. 

“I always wanted to impress her on her birthday,” Hux went on, quietly, weakly, limp in Ren’s grasp, nearly sliding out of his arms as if swooning, his exposed skin fever-hot. Ren found himself brushing a single lock of escaped hair off Hux’s clammy forehead and he felt a jolt run through Hux’s body, one of gratitude, of affection. Who was this?

“What did you do for her?”

“I wanted to give her something marvelous but I had nothing to give. I paid her in promises. Every year I made up a different planet I’d give her. I really believed they were real, even as I invented them. Isn’t that hilarious? Me making planets instead of destroying them? Things have changed so much. Everything. If I had stayed with her, I could have been a child. If my father had bothered to save her too, instead of just me. That’s why I don’t want…” His head lolled back as he sighed, his hair brushing Ren’s arm, his hands lying flat in his lap, palms up, tiny crescents still pressed into the skin between the life and heart lines. “I don’t want any of that in my head anymore.”

But there was a thread of something underneath the memories and underneath the rejection of the memories, and Ren tugged on it gently, pulled it towards him to see what it was. It was fear. It was fear that Ren would actually go through with what Hux had asked him to do—

_\--if you’re going to do it please do it fast please do it painlessly please I don’t want this anymore but I don’t want to lose it either, I don’t really want it gone but I can’t have it pressing on me like this, help, please help me, please—_

“Hux,” Ren said firmly, forcing his own focus above the tide of Hux’s emotions. “You’re going to fall asleep now.”

Hux’s mind was so open to Ren’s persuasion by now that it was as if he had been hit over the head, so quickly did his entire body go slack and still. He was so light that it was no trouble at all to pull him by the armpits further onto the bed, so his head was resting on Ren’s pillow. Complete with unwashed pillowcase. Oh, well. Hux could give him hell for that when the day cycle began. Asleep, Hux was still pale and sickly-looking, but the crushing, desperate fear that had gripped him when he entered looked like it was gone, and his face was neutral, his lips loosely parted. Ren was still inside his head, felt his own heartbeat pick up when he listened to the slow murmur of Hux’s sleeping thoughts.

_\--please don’t go anywhere...please don’t make me leave…you are the only person who I could come to like this, who I could see…you will never know how much I needed…_

“You’re not going to think about your mother for awhile,” Ren continued, swallowing thickly as he wove the corrected narrative through Hux’s mind. Technically he didn’t need to say any of this out loud, but it had always helped him. “When you wake up, you will remember only coming to my quarters late to discuss an urgent matter. You were feeling unwell and dizzy, and you fell asleep in my bed. I’m not taking away your memories. You can come get them when you feel better. You’re going to forget how to access them until you really need them.”

No doubt he was only buying Hux a little time, maybe another year, before her birthday rolled back around and he was plagued with thoughts of her again. Well, he could always come back and ask for help, anytime he wanted. Help with anything. Something had shifted between the two of them. Hux had exposed some raw pale unseen part of himself, willingly, begged Ren to look at it. And Ren had looked.

He brushed his fingers through Hux’s hair once more, marveling at how soft it was after it had been washed free of pomade for the night. Then he climbed down off the bed and back onto the floor to get back to his meditations. He wasn’t planning on going to sleep anytime soon, and he had plenty to think about. Ren closed his eyes, listening to Hux shift softly, and then all was as still and silent as it always was at this hour.

**Author's Note:**

> As you might have guessed from the beginning notes, the title's from the amazing song of the same name by Wilco, which might be the most Hux-applicable song I've heard, like, ever.
> 
> Huge thanks to the folks who arranged JediFest 2016! You're the real MVPs, and this whole event really helped give me the confidence to make an AO3 and finally start posting my fic instead of just emailing it to friends while hiding under a blanket. I appreciate all the time you spent organizing! 
> 
> And you can come find me on Tumblr at [ theweddingofthefoxes](theweddingofthefoxes.tumblr.com)


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